In our former culture such liars masquerading as reporters would have been publically shamed and then lost their jobs...these days one or more will probably win a prize at the next reporters love-in.
In the meantime undiscerning readers (of which there are many within the socialist ranks) will swallow wholesale the lies and use them in their own assault on the values that have made Australia the wonderful place it still is (just). These are the useful idiots who believe that the benefits we currently enjoy somehow magically happened as a result of cultural 'evolution', and most specifically the Grassby criminal enterprise termed 'multiculturalism'.
Unfortunately by the time that this rainbow mentality has been exposed the culture will have tanked, the economy trashed and bureaucracy will be ruling with its totalitarian grasp on all things:
Terry McCrann:
A NEWSPAPER which had any sense of its integrity would have published a public withdrawal of and apology for running a story that was so completely false and viciously defamatory as the one on purported company tax avoidance last Monday, splashed across the front pages of the Fairfax Media duo, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.
This needed to be an apology directed at both the companies which the Age and the Herald, collectively and individually and without the slightest shred of substantive evidence, falsely accused of massive and sustained tax avoidance; and to their readers for feeding them such provocative and simply untrue nonsense…
Anyone who had even the vaguest understanding of tax should have instantly realised the story and the so-called report on which it was based, were quite simply complete and utter rubbish…
(T)he report from the union United Voice and the collective of odds and sods, the so-called Tax Justice Network, purported to analyse the effective tax rates of the top 200 companies listed on the ASX over the last ten years, as against the 30 per cent company tax rate.
It purported to find that the average effective tax rate (ETR) of the 200 companies over the ten years was just 23 per cent. It then concluded that the failure to pay 30 per cent had cost tax revenue of an average $8.4 billion a year or a staggering $84 billion in total.
The report — and the guileless Age and Herald — listed the key ways big companies could avoid tax: by routing income through tax havens, by ‘transfer pricing’ with overseas affiliates, and by loading up the local company with debt to get a tax deduction.
So did they then specifically identify the use of these techniques by any — all — of the 200? Not a bit of it; all the report did was add up the reported pre-tax profits and tax provisions of the 200 over the last ten years, divide the second by the first, and out popped that 23 per cent ETR. And the conclusion of massive tax avoidance…
Astonishingly, the report claims and the Age/Herald breathlessly retailed that News Corp (now 21st Century Fox) underpaid an extraordinary $16 billion of tax in total over the ten years — fully 20 per cent of the tax purportedly avoided by the entire 200!.
Even more astonishingly, the report just made that figure up. The annual reports of News Corp show that it recorded a total profit of $US36 billion over the ten years and provided $US8.3 billion in tax. That’s an effective tax rate of 23 per cent, somewhat higher than the claimed 1 per cent. The authors and the Age/Herald seem unaware that News Corp was a US company over the entire ten years; that something like 90 per cent of its business and quite normal profits — and so any tax payments — were in the US. So even if that completely fictitious figure of $1.6 billion a year was tax really lost, it would have been tax lost to the US internal Revenue Service and not to the ATO, as both the report and they claimed
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